C/IL 102
Notes on The Internet: Behind the Web videorecording from
The History Channel

Acknowledgement:
The Internet Pioneers
web site was also used as a source of information.

Perhaps no invention has ever had as much impact
in as a short a span of time as has the Internet, which
has become, in only 40 years, a key component of human
culture and civilization, in particular with respect to
entertainment, communication, and economics.
Its rapid growth is due, at least in part, to the fact that it
really has no controlling authority.

In a vague sense, the origins of the Internet go back to the 1940's,
during which time
Vannevar Bush
(who had earned a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and was the Director
of the Office of Scientific Research and Development) facilitated and
institutionalizied a relationship between the federal government
(of the United States), the American scientific community, and business.
This set the stage for the later creation of the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
The July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly included
As We May Think,
a very influential essay by Bush that described the concept of a
memex, a device for enhancing human memory by allowing
document storage and retrieval based upon "associative" links,
or what we know today, in the context of web pages on the
World Wide Web, as
hyperlinks
(which allow a reader to jump instantly from one electronic document
to another).

In a somewhat more concrete sense, the Internet can be traced back to 1957,
when the surprise launch into outer space of the Soviet Union's Sputnik
satellite spurred the United States to initiate several research &
development projects intended to re-establish its superiority in science
and technology. To provide a framework for some of these projects,
in early 1958 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower formed the aforementioned
ARPA. (Later the word "Defense" was added, yielding what is today
called DARPA.)

J.C.R. Licklider,
a psychologist at MIT (but having a strong background in math, physics,
and computing), is credited with putting forth a vision of human-computer
interaction that suggested, among other things, the idea of computers being
able to communicate with each other in order to facilitate the exchange
of information among researchers. (In particular, as an employee of ARPA
from 1962 to 1964, he was interested in ARPA research contractors being
able to communicate with each other efficiently.)
(The video referred to his vision as a galactic network.)

During the early 1960's, the theoretical foundations for computer
networking were established by
LeonardKleinrock,
Paul Baran, and
Donald Davies, the
last of whom is not mentioned in the videorecording.

Kleinrock's PhD research (1961-62, at MIT) applied queueing theory to
communications networking. (A queue is nothing more than what
in the U.S. is called a "waiting line", as in a grocery store or cafeteria.
In Great Britain, one typically says "queue" rather than "line".)
On the video, he identifies his two crucial ideas as being

demand access: To optimize resource sharing in a network,
a node (i.e., an entity on the network)
shouldn't get what it needs until it needs it.

distributed control: (as opposed to central control)
Each node should contribute to the control function, as opposed to
that responsibility being given to a single node.

In Kleinrock's approach, a message is transmitted through a network
(beginning at the source node, ending at the destination node, and
"hopping" through intermediate nodes along a path between them)
in units referred to as packets.
Each packet is sent through the network independently of others
(even those that are part of the same message).
This approach is called packet switching, which is significantly
different from circuit switching (such as is traditionally used
in the telephone network), in which a dedicated path (or "circuit") is
established between the two communicating nodes and is maintained until
the "conversation" has ended.

With the threat of nuclear war against the Soviet Union on everyone's
mind, people recognized that it was important for the country's national
defense to develop the technology to support a communications network
that could function even if parts of it had been damaged or destroyed.

By 1962, enough research had been done to suggest that such a network
could be built. However, it would take seven more years before that
would be accomplished.
(The videorecording suggests that the U.S. government's support for
computer network research languished during the 1960's due to its
heavy focus upon the Apollo space program.)

In 1966, Robert Taylor became director of ARPA's Information Processing
Techniques Office (IPTO), succeeding Licklider.
In order to meet the requests of research contractors for more computing
resources and to decrease duplication of work among them, he decided
that ARPA should link together (i.e., make capable of communicating with
each other) the computers at ARPA-funded research institutions, which
would allow greater sharing of resources and results.
(Among the issues making this a complicated problem was that the
computers intended to be linked were of different kinds; in effect,
what was envisioned was a "heterogeneous" computer network.)
A million dollars was allocated to this project, and Taylor recruited
Larry Roberts
to manage it.

In 1967, Wes Clark gave Roberts the idea to use
Interface
Message Processors (IMPs) as a central feature of the design.
The idea was that each mainframe host computer would be connected to
an IMP, which would act as a "gateway" to the network, handling all
communication with other computers on the network.
In 1968, Roberts sent out bids to 140 companies to build the IMPs.
By the end of the year, the contract was awarded to BBN.
In January of 1969, BBN began working on it, with Frank Heart
(with the rather high-pitched voice on the video) as the project manager.

By October of 1969, IMPs had been delivered to UCLA and Stanford Research
Institute and the machines there connected. By the end of the year,
University of California Santa Barbara and University of Utah had also
been connected to the network.
By April of 1971, 18 computers were on the network.

In 1972, Ray Tomlinson developed —in his spare time, because
no one was really asking for it—
what the video refers to as the Internet's first "killer app",
e-mail (although it wouldn't be called that for several years).
In particular, he adopted the convention of using the @-sign
in an e-mail address.

In the video,
Bob
Metcalfe (who is famous for inventing the Ethernet network
technology) laughs about how three significant software applications
were developed during the first year or two of the fledgling Internet
(namely, remote login (telnet), file transfer,
and e-mail), but not another one for about twenty years.

The early developers of the Internet created an academic-like culture
of knowledge-sharing and cooperation.
There was no "authority" who made design decisions unilaterally and
imposed them on the other participants/contributors.
Rather, ideas were presented and responses solicited, so that
decisions ended up being made by consensus.
The video says that the genius of its design was
generality of purpose.

As an example of this, during the 1970's
Vint Cerf
and Bob Kahn developed and refined TCP/IP, which in 1983
was adopted as the universal protocol by which messages are transmitted
over the Internet. Of significance about TCP/IP is that is made it
possible to connect independent networks together to form an
internet (i.e., a network of networks).

During the 1980's, use of ARPA's network (which had actually been split
into two) remained restricted, mostly to academic and military
institutions.
It is not surprising, then, that commercial networks sprang up,
including Prodigy, CompuServ, and AOL (America Online).

During the early 1990's, laws were passed that opened up the Internet to
commercial use. At first, the impact was not all that great, largely
because only skilled computer users could effectively find information
on the network.

But that changed during the period 1990-93, due to two major developments.
The first (in 1991) was the
World Wide Web (WWW),
which is basically the marriage of
hypertext
(as envisioned by Bush, see above) and the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee
is credited with having "invented" the WWW, as he designed and implemented
HTTP
(Hypertext Transfer Protocol,
the rules by which hypertext is transferred/exchanged) and
HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language,
which is the "language" in which most web pages are written).

The second (in 1993) was
Mosaic,
a web browser far superior to any browser available before.
In particular, it had a graphical user interface, made it much
easier to follow hyperlinks, and supported the inclusion of images
within web pages (as opposed to images having to be viewed as
stand-alone documents).
Mosaic was developed by
Marc Andreesen
at the University of Illinois and is credited with spurring a huge
increase in popularity/participation in the WWW.

An equally significant increase in usage occurred in 1995, when the
major online services (Compuserv, America Online, and Prodigy)
connected to the Internet, thereby allowing their millions of customers
to gain access to it.

In the 15+ years since then, the Internet has become ubiquitous in the
lives of millions of people, especially the young.
We use it as a source of news and entertainment; for communicating
with friends, shopping, doing research, and paying bills.